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New Publication Improves Snow Measurements

Friday, June 22, 2018

-Photo Credit: Alexej Sirén

Warmer temperatures and shifts in precipitation threaten wildlife species adapted to snow. A new study develops a novel camera trap method to evaluate the accuracy of gridded snow data in a mountainous region of the northeastern US. Increasing our understanding the ecological importance of winter is critical, and this study assesses how snow depth observations from remote cameras compare with gridded climate data, the sources of error associated with the gridded data and the influence of spatial sampling on bias. This enables site data that can effectively evaluate the fine‐scale processes as well as address the growing need, catalyzed by climate change, for high resolution, on‐the‐ground environmental data to understand current and future conditions.